BattleFront Games

Part of what we do here at NDNG is to bring excitement into our hobby and reach out to the community to get them to enjoy all the great games we play. Part of this is holding demo games whenever possible and I recently had the opportunity to hold a demo of the new Great War book at in Ashburn Va.

Holding a demo at this store seems fitting, my first taste of was playing FOW-1918 at a convention hosted by the owner of Huzzah Chris Huhn almost ten years ago. I asked Chris, who is a huge Great War fan if I can hold a demo at his store and he quickly found me some space at his store.

By Ian Birdwell

After having all of my time the past few weeks eaten up by “real life” and “responsibilities”, I was finally able to take some time to head over to the club to play a game.

Challis, one of club members, has also been waylaid by the same things I have been and hadn’t had an opportunity to play his soviets since August of last year (Check out the battle report here ) we were fixing for a friendly throw down.

Given our mutual love for all things Eastern Front, we opted to throw down with 109 point forces from Red Banner and Desperate Defense (check out the release article here ).

Right now, you can play a lot of rulesets: every history age, from chariot warfare to modern skirmish, sci-fi, and fantasy, any scale from 6 mm to 1/48. However, if you are an “aged” wargamer in his thirties or forties, you’ll probably have been looking for a ruleset to play with younger players. They could be those teenager guys at the club still playing Warhammer 40K and lingering on something deeper or different, or your own kids who’ve seen you playing obscure rulesets like so difficult to understand when you don’t know exactly what is happening on the table, but still wanting to “play with daddy”.

Tanks: The Modern Age (TMA) is a really good solution. It’s a fast, inexpensive set of rules (24 Dollars or 23 Euros) for tactical skirmishes. You can play almost everywhere since it needs a relatively small surface, and you can reuse your Team Yankee vehicles (or FOW ones, if you prefer the original Tanks, set in WW2 – the rules are pretty the same). Most importantly, you can teach the rules in 15 minutes even to your grandmother in law.

By Benny Christiansen

One of the things I enjoy doing is to experiment. City Fight rules, found in the back of Enemy Of The Gates and Iron Cross books, were very interesting for me. I was preparing for a tournament at the time and thus did not have the time to pay much attention to them.

Going through the rules, I noted a few things before my first games.

First, smoke barrage seemed very effective. Filling a room with smoke seemed a good way to protect your assaulting units. Assaulting teams benefit from concealment and bulletproof cover when assaulting rooms, and with smoke, it could be potentially very, very difficult to stop an assault.

I really wanted to find out more about this, so I decided there and then, to make sure I would test a list that could fire smoke.

Rubble and Tree lines are suggested terrain features, and I have realized that in V4, I really love the infantry, and so I could see a chance to throw loads of infantry on the table and have fun.

D-Day is coming! In June (could be any another month?) Battlefront will publish army lists for the Normandy landings, effectively starting the Late WW2 period. After years fighting with “hit on 3+” and “test morale on 5+”, US troops will finally get much better, with tanks able to worry the German counterparts. For this reason, I began to assemble my new US army, with a mix of Mechanized infantry, Shermans, M3 halftracks, 105mm artillery, and M10s to punch enemy armour. But I also wanted a “personal” army, something really unique. Each tank with a different layout, each infantry base with a personal touch.

In this first half of the US Late Army painting guide, we will see how to customize your tanks (they can be German or Russian, obviously) with some tricks and advice to have flags, sandbags, and nets where you want.

by Tom Burgess

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) makes its third appearance in the Team Yankee/Flames of War universe in Oil War. Having been an IDF player in the Fate of a Nation (1st and 2nd Ed), I volunteered to review them in Oil War. I was particularly keen to see how much of my previous Fate of a Nation collection would carry forward to the circa 1985 period.

The history of the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution has been….complicated. And in the case of this part of the oil wars book, the fluff provided gives an appropriately involved and messy political history worthy of the 3rd World War environment of the book.  The Iranians make a devil’s bargain with

their Soviet overlords, and find themselves in a slugging match with many other nations across the desert.  Because of the nature of the varied assistance, they have received from 1st world and 2nd world allies over the past several decades, Iran is a hodgepodge of different tanks, equipment packaging, and weapons systems.

By Dennis Campbell AKA Matt Varnish

Hello everyone,

Let’s talk about Iraq and Syria in Team Yankee. While we will not discuss politics at all in this article, when you think of Villains of the late 20th century, the regimes of Iraq and Syria certainly are at the top of the list.

So why play them?  For me, I tend to run ‘the bad guys’ stemming from my little brother always wanting ‘the good guys’ as toys (he wanted GI Joes, so I played Cobra, he wanted Rebels, so my figurines were Imperial for Star Wars, etc) and since then, my tendency to play bad guys translated to other games such as Warhammer and 40k, and now to Team Yankee. I am currently re-painting my old Soviet force into Syrians, and as you can see, I even have the terrain ready to go:

By Chris Jackson

It’s almost here. The long-awaited Oil Wars hits the shelves in a few short days. I have been lucky enough to get a sneak peak at it and more importantly, I have permission to share what I have seen.

Oil Wars covers the armies of the Middle East at the time of the fictional WWIII portrayed by Team Yankee. Iran and Iraq have been at war for four years and both find their armies rejuvenated by an influx of equipment, advisors, and direct support from their respective superpower benefactors.

With the release of Oil Wars,  the new book for just about to be spoiled in about a week we here at NDNG want to give you another force to use with this new release. Manning the southern and eastern most flank of NATO sits the Turkish army, ready to fight against the USSR. However alongside this threat the Turkish nations sits near other hot-spots of the mid 1980’s. Turkey also borders the nations of Iraq and Iran, two nations that are represented in the new Oil Wars book.